The present invention relates to the field of content tagging and, more particularly, to assisting users in searching for tagged content based on historical usage patterns.
With the explosion of user generated and non-user generated content, tagging has become a key part in the organization process. Frequently, users organize content using a personalized tagging scheme based on what they feel is relevant and appropriate. That is, content tags can be affected by a user's personality, knowledge of content, mood, primary language, and various other factors. While this is a great strength of tagging, it quickly leads to user-centric tags. User-centric tags counteract the organization provided by tagging and increase the difficulty in searching for tagged content. For example, while a user can tag a Web page about game consoles with the tag “gaming”, another user may tag the same Web page with the keyword “game platforms”. As such, users often have to guess as to what an appropriate tag would be for content. Additionally, a user can often unintentionally use several variants of a tag keyword to tag content. For instance, a user can keyword tag a picture of a “church” with the keyword “church” and at a later date tag another picture of a church as “cathedral”.
Further, content is often inadvertently tagged with the wrong keyword(s) resulting in content being incorrectly categorized and/or stored. Searching for incorrectly tagged and/or mislabeled content can be a frustrating and time consuming endeavor which detracts from the user experience. At present, there is no solution to compensate for the drawbacks associated with tagging.